Fenestra Winery Blog

Sips of News from the Wine Maker

2010 is shaping up to be a very interesting year. The weather has been mild, much cooler than usual. Because of this, the grapes are ripening at a slower pace, which is a good thing. This should allow the grapes to develop more flavor and varietal character, while maintaining better acidity.

Overall, harvest will begin about 2-3 weeks later than usual. This may pose some problems for the later season varietals. If the weather starts to get too cool or if the rains begin too early, those varietals won’t get ripe.

Vineyard yields this year are also lower than average, which should improve quality.

Brent Amos

Winemaker

Crush Recap

This has been an extended harvest. It started September 1st, two weeks later than expected, with over 4 tons of Verdelho from Silvaspoons Vineyards, and we still have several lots of grapes, as of October 28th, to crush. We have yet to receive red grapes from Ghielmetti Vineyards (Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot), Mourvedre from our own Estate Vineyard, and Tempranillo and Riesling from Wente. We harvested our first crop of Grenache (about 3 tons) from our Estate Vineyard, and also crushed over 2 tons from Rick Hansen's Vineyard here in Livermore and almost 5 tons from Silvaspoons Vineyard.

Since we live in Sunol, I have wanted to produce wine from Sunol grapes, so this year we crushed 2.8 tons of Pinot Gris grapes from Ted Buttner's Vineyard on Foothill Rd. near the town of Sunol. We will make this in the style of a Chardonnay with barrel fermentation and extended lees contract, rather than the lighter Pinot Grigio style. Also, we are making three different lots of Tempranillo: two from the Lodi area (Silvaspoons and Bokisch vineyards) and one from Livermore Valley.

Crush & Beyond!

The quality of the grapes this year is excellent. Because of the mild weather, the fruit has had time to ripen slower, and come to full maturity. This year we picked the first crop from our Estate Grenache vineyard, and it looks very promising. Some other new grapes this year included Carignane (a Rhone varietal) from Oakley. The head-trained vines are over 100 years old. We also got Souzão from a vineyard in Livermore. I intend to use it as a blending wine for our Livermore wines. We do buy Souzão from Lodi, but that is used in the production of our Port. The one I am most excited about is Pinot Gris from a vineyard in Sunol.

Now that Harvest is almost over, its time to start preparing for bottling season (no rest for the wicked). In December, we'll be bottling some 2007 wines that benefited from an extra 6 months of barrel age: Estate Syrah, Thatcher Bay Cabernet Sauvignon, and the Ghielmetti Petite Sirah. We'll also be bottling the 2009 Verdelho.

Brent Amos Winemaker

Further Crush Update

We have crushed 4.9 tons of Cab Franc, 7.8 tons of Cinsault, , 3.1 tons of Alvarelhao, 3.2 tons of Mourvedre and 1.9 tons of Souzao from Silvaspoons Vineyard.  In case you are not familiar with Cinsault, it is a Rhone-type variety which has light color and fruity bouquet.  We will use it in a True Red blend.  We also crushed 4.0 tons of Merlot from Thatcher Bay Vineyard and 11.2 tons of Syrah from our Estate vineyard.  The Syrah was quite ripe at 28 deg. Brix, but a much better yield than last year when we only got 7.5 tons.

Our Estate Grenache and Mourvedre are still hanging.

Later this week we expect to get Semillon and Zinfandel.

Sip of News from the Winemaker!

Another harvest is upon us.

Harvest has started later than usual this year, with Verdelho from Silvaspoons Vineyards, being the first grapes to arrive.

I expect this to be a great year. We’ve had mild weather so far, allowing the grapes to ripen more slowly and to develop more intense flavors.

In our estate vineyards, we’ve been cluster thinning (we cut off excess clusters) to allow more even ripening and to increase quality. We’ve also been leaf-pulling on the eastern side of the vines to expose the grapes to dappled morning sunlight (which will increase color and flavor). We don’t pull leaves on the western side of the vines because too much exposure to the afternoon sun will result in sunburn. This will be the first year we get fruit from our new Estate Grenache vineyard.

This year we plan to crush about 135 Tons of grapes, which is a little bit less than last year.

Crush Update

Fenestra Winery has crushed the following loads of grapes: 4.3 tons of Verdelho, 4.7 tons of Grenache, and 5.1 tons of Malbec, all from from Silvaspoons Vineyards in Galt; 4.3 tons of Chardonnay from Dr. Greist's vineyard in Livermore; 2.81 tons of Pinot Gris from Ted Buttner's vineyard off Foothill Rd. in Sunol; about 7 tons of Viognier from Tom Bloomfield's vineyard in Brentwood; and 3.1 tons of Tempranillo from Bokisch Vineyards near Lodi.  So far the grapes have been nicely ripe with lots of flavor.

The recent rain slowed down the ripening process, but otherwise should not be a problem.  We will probably get Cab Franc from Silvaspoons Vineyards later this week and our Estate Syrah next week.

Brent experimented with overnight skin contact (leaving the juice in contact with the crushed grapes) on the Viognier, and this extracted a lot flavor.